Insanity Works

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Workarounds

There are four types of tech users:

  1. Regular users: they only use what works; they do things the way they’ve always done them; they aren’t good at troubleshooting

  2. Power users: they know how and, more importantly, why things work the way they do; they can troubleshoot, find solutions, and find workarounds

  3. Fixers: when something goes wrong, they don’t just find a workaround, they actually figure out what’s happened and then they properly fix it

  4. Hackers: they figure out why things went wrong and how else things can go wrong; they find the edge cases that make things go wrong

I bring this up because, while I’m usually a fixer, when I don’t have enough fucks to give I’m happy to just be a power user.

Screenshot of a Kindle Store page taken from an Amazon Kindle Oasis device.

Case in point: since my Kindle Oasis firmware got updated last week it has refused to open the book that I was reading when the update took place.

I’d tried everything short of completely factory-resetting the device when I found a workaround: if I go to that book in the Kindle store (via the device) and once there I click the ‘Read’ button, the book opens and works just fine. So that’s what I’m doing now.

Is this a pain? Yes. Does it fix the problem? No. Do I know why there’s a problem? Probably. Do I care enough to do something about it? No.

And so I keep using the workaround :)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯